This is a multi-part response that requires that we review what EMDR demands that clients have in place. It also requires a broad understanding of what attachment wounds actually are, why they are so wounding, and why those wounds show up as deficits in the very information networks that we’re trying to connect.
What is required to do EMDR therapy?
Slow down, be present, notice. These are not easy tasks for people who are pervasively traumatized. In fact, most people with this type of wounding have survival strategies that move them opposite these tasks.
Activate, but not overactivate.
Need to have enough adaptive information for the difficult stuff to connect to. You cannot connect a lie to a lie, and you can’t land a whale into a canoe.
What are attachment wounds?
They are about everything.
They have ten thousand tentacles.
They are about pervasively unmet need.
They are about lovability, connection, safety, family, belonging, value, importance, and identity. They are about everything and they are behind a lot of our triggering now when we get triggered decades later, they fuel our addictions, our obsessions, are the logic behind all of our forms of disconnection, and are why love is so hard right now. For all of these reasons, they are not easy targets and especially not initial ones. But they are essential ones. Clients with this type of wounding probably will not get pervasively better until someone can help the kid parts out of that existentially lonely childhood state.
Other than being big and nested targets, what else is difficult about this type of wound?
Attachment trauma is wounding in at least four ways that directly impact EMDR processing based on the requirements of EMDR that I just defined.
Being born to people who don’t know how to meet our needs is wounding. It’s one of the worst wounds we have. It’s almost always the big Barnum and Bailey center ring of the trauma circus. If that’s how you are starting in this life, everything after that is probably side-show. The somatic state of that wound is easy to mistake for sadness and is easy to mistake for anxiety because it has plenty of both in it. For many people, with attachment wounding, huge existential loneliness is the core intolerable emotion. What do we do in EMDR therapy? Activate, but don’t overactivate. When we connect to it, existential loneliness doesn’t want to come in small, measured, noticeable, and digestible chunks. It’s what your clients are trying to stay ahead of when they are surviving by not slowing down. It’s the size of weather. They will put a needle in their arm not to feel it for an hour. Again, events have a beginning, middle, and an end. Attachment wounds are about everything.
When we are born to people who don’t know how to meet our needs, they very often shame, blame, humiliate us for having those needs. This causes serious confusion about those needs, but in those needs are some foundational adaptive information about what it means to be born human. Which is why people with attachment wounding will burn themselves up looking for or trying to make themselves into the very things they were already born being. Abuse and neglect in early childhood are awful, but the reasons given for the abuse and the neglect find their way deep into the rust red marrow of identity. And every one of them is a lie. You cannot connect a lie to a lie in EMDR therapy, and paired with unmet need is almost always a lie that accounts for it.
Because this wounding is so pervasive and the somatic experience/reexperience of it is so horrible, we typically need powerful coping strategies to manage them. Dealing with unmet need is how many of us learned the early alchemy of self-erasure. And while that disconnective impulse can truly be the thing that saves us, it’s often the thing that can make it harder for us to get exposure to the corrective information that we ultimately need to heal. Trauma of this type necessitates survival strategies and survival strategies often have costs. The cost of those strategies form some of the challenges in EMDR therapy related to addictions, obsessions and compulsions, dissociation, somatic disconnection, well protected systems, masking, overachieving, and perfectionism. All of which can be complications and some of which can block this work entirely.
When we are born to people who didn’t know how to meet our needs, we did not have the experience of getting our needs met. So many things about who we are, what we are worth, and how we deserve to be treated must be obtained through actual experiential learning. The easiest things to believe about ourselves are the things modeled in our earliest experiences. The things we experientially missed when we were very young comprise much of deficit in the very adaptive information that is most needed for us to heal now.
The purpose of this episode was to take a 30,000 foot view of what is complicated about attachment wounding and to provide some context about why I’m really unlikely to start with these targets in EMDR therapy. Other podcasts will highlight some options in preparing to work on attachment wounds, and almost everything I do is experiential. Relational wounds typically require corrective relational experiences to heal. The therapeutic relationship is part of that. Relational experiences with attachment figure resources are great places to start. Relational experiences between the client’s parts are perhaps an even better place to start. Resolving small targets can help build some of the adaptive information needed for the bigger ones.
The book, EMDR With Complex Trauma, walks you through some of the categories of targets I like to start with and is designed to give you some clues about when the client does have enough adaptive information to land these memories. It gives you options about how to help clients develop the needed adaptive information.
In summary, not all memories are the same. You cannot connect a lie to a lie. And these memories tend to be the whales of memories. There is a logic for not starting in the territories of the most identity confusion. It’s sensible not to start with territories that hold the most intolerable somatic states.
The goal in working with healthy people is to work efficiently. The goal in working with complex clients is to start somewhere. The risk is that we get so overwhelmed by the complexity that we don’t start at all. And by all means, we have to get there. Something, ideally the client’s most resourced parts, needs to go to that little kid, wrap their arms around him, and tell him that he was born good enough, that he always deserved to get his needs met, that he was born lovable, and that none of it was his fault. Somebody needs to say it. Somebody needs to construct that experience. But, it is often a bad idea to go straight there right out of the gate.
If you are a therapist or therapist trainee and would like to join a demonstration of aspects of the RAP Technique in a group context with David Archer, you can request to join here.
Thomas Zimmerman Welcome. I’m Tom Zimmerman from the EMDR Podcast. I’m here with David Archer, who’s an anti-racist psychotherapist from Montreal, Canada. He is a clinical social worker, couple and family therapist, author, speaker, novelist and a supporter of oppressed and equality-seeking people everywhere. If you’re an EMDR therapist, you may know David from his important book, I have it right here, Anti-Racist Psychotherapy. And I wanted to interview David a while about a book from a few years ago Racial Trauma Recovery, and his Rhythm and Processing Technique, which we’re going to refer to as RAP.
Every conversation that I’ve had with David has left me with new insights and important ones, so I’m delighted to be able to share more of your work and mission with people who may already be somewhat familiar with your work, but maybe ready to embrace and practice transformational change, but maybe through new lenses or new strategies to help us help us rescue ourselves from all of the cultural stuff and all of our individual stuff, and basically rescue ourselves from ourselves. So welcome.
David Archer Well, thank you so much for that introduction. And Tom, always a pleasure speaking with you. Many blessings to you and to your audience. I am looking forward to this discussion.
Thomas Zimmerman Excellent. It’s also… it’s also clear to me that you’re able to talk about things and talk about transformational change from a place of joy and optimism and hope. So, can we start there? Do you know what I mean? Because I think that’s what people in some ways need to heal… really need to hear, but I think what you have to offer is really compelling stuff related to what now? You know, what do we do about this? We’ve been getting better and better and better at diagnosis of what’s wrong with us. But what do we do about any of it?
David Archer Right? Yeah. So I’m going to start… because that’s a great question. And so I’m going to take this roundabout way of being able to answer it, because, as you mentioned, is that I’m a family systems therapists. I work with couples, families, individuals. Even when I meet, meet with an individual, there’s usually a context that they find themselves in. So we’re never just meeting a person that’s really separate from their community, or separate from their work environment, or separate from the relationship, etc. So when I was writing, Anti-Racist Psychotherapy, I did start writing at first from a place of anger, actually, is that I was learning all of the difficult things that were happening during the protests of 2020…. police violence, also just knowing that I was experiencing stresses that my White colleagues were not experiencing. And I was trying to understand what was happening not just from the from the lens of my emotions, but also from the neurobiological explanations. And from the science and the research that was out there. I tried to make it so that there was a communication between the activist side of myself and also the scientist side of myself. And ultimately, it led to Anti-Racist Psychotherapy, it led to the path of just thinking about race from a different perspective, and also looking at how we can heal from racial trauma from a different perspective. And then it leads to that third book that you were talking about. Actually, let me not skip. The second book was called Black Meditation: Ten Practices for Self-Care, Mindfulness, and Self-Determination. And I wrote that book, because as you mentioned, I’m in Montreal, Canada. And when I was speaking about being able to treat racial trauma, I noticed that a lot of people were seeking my assistance. But there were only other like five other Black therapists that I could refer to because of our own systemic injustices that are in my province. So I wanted to write a book to make it so that it wasn’t so much focused on racial trauma, but it was focused on how a person can feel pride and feel good about the the situation that they find themselves in, despite the attacks that take place because of because of anti-Blackness and all of this. And so in Black Meditation, it was different practices that people could use to feel good for no reason to make it so that people could know that they deserve to feel good in their bodies, regardless of their identity, regardless of how society sees them. So I realize that sometimes when we talk about racism or when we talk about treatment-resistant issues, it leaves us in this place of… it puts us in a box… and so that’s why in meeting you and learning about your approaches, I like I was also inspired by the way how you were looking at psychotherapy and the practice of it. And by learning about the development of Flash, the development of Four Blinks, it led me to start to think, okay, how do I put together the idea of anti-racist psychotherapy, the positivity that’s in Black Meditation, and that’s what led to the birth of Racial Trauma Recovery. And so Racial Trauma Recovery was then talking about Rhythm and Processing strategies of trying to find an integrative framework that can allow people to heal and recover, who are most impacted by the violence that is in society. And by being able to make an approach to eliminate or that’s meant to eliminate the mental health consequences of racial trauma, it ended up being something that helps all marginalized people. So I was also a plenary speaker at the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation in Kentucky. And that’s where I spoke about Racial Trauma Recovery and the RAP Technique, there was a presentation I showed me using the technique with one of my clients with their permission, of course. And there were a lot of people who were like, what?, people can heal in this way, like people could heal by watching like a river, or they could heal by watching anime or something. And so I knew that I was onto something. And I wanted to make as many people just know that healing is possible in this way. So then the fourth book is Black Mountain: Fight for the Future, which I think you said you have.
Thomas Zimmerman I have that right here. So tell us about this. Because I’ve heard you say elsewhere. If you’re gonna be about something be about it. Yes. You know what I mean? And this is, tell us about this.
David Archer Yes, yes. So again, is that so writing academically and writing for different audiences… I, you know. Okay, this is actually reminding me of this. When I went to Kentucky. I remember I spoke to one of the people that was at the hotel who was one of the attendants. They were there asking me, “Oh, so what are you doing down here? You’re from Montreal, what are you doing in Kentucky?” I was like, “I’m giving a presentation about anti-racist psychotherapy.” They’re like, “What?” And I told him that yeah, you know, it’s like, there are these books that I’ve written. There’s this stigma, super interesting how people can heal. And then a young black lady, and she said, “Oh, well, that’s good. But you know, I don’t really read that much.” And so then I, it made me think about this is a younger person saying that she doesn’t read. Despite the fact that some of our ancestors when we think about like ancient Egypt, which is called Kemet, some of these people were the first people to invent the writing systems of the papyrus, and, and all of these things in hieroglyphs and all of this. So the reason why I wrote this book, Black Mountain: Fight for the Future was to have a science fiction novel, something that’s very different from what therapists would typically write about. But you can read that book and still understand the previous three books, because I wanted to make it so that different types of audiences can know that trauma is something that impacts people, that trauma is something we can recover from. And by getting in touch with our ancestral memory, and by with through community, and by being able to learn more about ourselves and learn more about how society works, we can access our inner powers to change the future and assault and defeat the interplanetary fascist government that’s attacking everybody. So it was a work of joy. It was a work of joy. I wrote this book because I was like, okay, my son right now he’s about like, 18 months old, it’s going to be a little bit of time before he goes into university and starts to read about anti-racist psychotherapy. So let me make something that is for younger people, or even just people who want to have a story that’s not so academically dense, and something that involves, like, you know, the things that are close to my heart: video games, anime, and, yeah, and so then the fifth book, Transforming Complex Trauma… the reason why I wrote this is because my brother was like, I like your books but your books are so long, I need a shorter book. And I was like, Alright, cool. Let me try to write a book that’s even shorter, but then it ended up being a long book anyways, because I can’t help it. There’s so much that needs to be spoken about. And so Transforming Complex Trauma is going to be the release that’s coming out soon. This is the this is the author copy, so your copy will not have this grey thing on it. But Transforming Complex Trauma is not only us thinking differently about psychotherapy about the practice of it, critically looking at the origins, the racist origins that are in the sciences that make it so that anti-racist psychotherapy is not just concerned with therapists but also dentistry. Also with gynecology. And trying to find a way of making it so that regardless of whether you’re a practicing psychotherapist, you can still think like a revolutionary therapist in your own in your own way. But you don’t need to have the MSW, the MFT, or the PhD, in order to do therapeutic interventions, in order to do things that can help people. And then because many of my clients present, not because specifically of racial trauma, but they come to meet with me because they had a racial event with their doctor, or with their lawyer or with a police officer, it means we all in our respective fields need to be inspired in this way to create the next anti-racist dentistry the next anti-racist, and I’m saying dentistry and all of us because I came back from doing a keynote presentation at the University of Michigan for the MLK Symposium, where I did speak about the joy of, of helping people to heal, and just trying to honor again, our ancestors honoring and remembering MLK his legacy in a proper way. And also seeing that he was a radical and knowing that we need radically different ways of being able to approach these problems. And in the way that we see racism an untreatable issue. I believe that… and as we’re probably going to talk about, many of our clients come to meet with us because they’ve been told that they’re broken. And if we have the technology now, to help clients to treat these so-called treatment-resistant issues, there may be a way of also being able to treat the sickness that is within the society as well, with the right technology, and with the right heart behind it.
Thomas Zimmerman Yeah. And there’s so many things to love about what you’re doing. But many of the things that you focus on, a lot of people believe are intractable problems. They’re just, they’re just impossible problems. But it seems to me like the key that you have is you understand how people heal? You have strategies, right? And you see it, that’s one of the things that I think a lot of people in our audience, if they’re an EMDR therapist… hopefully some people who have not seen transformational healing upfront, will be able to, you know, see podcasts like this, get curious about it. But can you talk about how this connects? So anti-racist psychotherapy, newer approaches like, Flash? Because I mean, there’s, you’re integrating a lot of things, but your approach is very integrated as well. Right. And it’s not, it’s not entirely fair to say that the RAP Technique is a is a primarily Flash approach, because it’s it has some things from EMDR. It has some things with Flash, it has some things from parts work, it has some things from… a very kind of integrated approach. But I guess my question is, can you talk about these newer approaches to psychotherapy? And what’s awesome, what’s awesome about them and why they may be unique for anti-racist endeavors?
David Archer Sure. So I think some of the problems, if I go back to talking about MLK, is that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is an important part of the American consciousness. But every year he’s misremembered and sometimes he’s misremembered for specific functions… We can have some politicians that will say Happy MLK Day. But then if you look, you scroll down to their, their feed, and you’ll see, wait, this person had this, this racist intervention that he had in Congress or something, or they’re passing these bills that are anti-immigrant or pro-military. And we need to know that and that MLK was not only anti-racist, but he was also anti-poverty, which we rarely talk about poor people, when we’re talking about therapy, or just generally speaking, we try to marginalize them literally, that we don’t even talk about the amount of poor people. And also he was against militarism as well. So these, I think that we need to listen directly to him to be able to really appreciate what he was trying to say. And when we listen to him, even though it’s in the 60s that he was talking the message feels as if he could have just said it yesterday. So with psychotherapy, again, the origins of how it came up, just knowing that Sigmund Freud… he could have made the field start off as being trauma-informed a long time ago, but then he was isolated when he would come from talking about we spoke about the Etiology of Neurosis… of Hysteria. I believe that that’s, that’s correct. Okay. And the problem is that he was rejected for talking about the trauma-informed perspective, because then it would mean that you’d have to believe his clients or his clients were saying that they were sexually violated and assaulted by their parents. And that itself was a little taboo. So instead of that, he had to make the psychotherapy, that’s based on the idea that, that it’s the therapist who’s really going to interpret what the client’s experience is, rather than the inverse. Coming from a trauma-informed perspective means that I’m listening to my client, I’m going to believe them. I believe that, because they’ve been disempowered, I need to find a way of being able to empower them. And even if it does shake this hierarchy between the therapist and the client, there is a possibility that the client is going to end up with a transformative experience. So in the basis of how our field is structured, is that there is an expert and there was this person who’s just begging, just begging to be able to get the healing, please, like therapist helped me. And I think that that itself is really related to the White Savior Complex, that’s going to say that the White person and the idea is like, let me go to this country and hold pictures of African children, because these African children just really want to have my hug. But none of them, no money, no resources, no peace, they just want to have an IG photo. And so this is the reason why I think that I can’t look at psychotherapy as being different from our society. I know that there’s changes that need to happen in society, in the structure of it, but there’s changes that need to happen in the psychotherapy as well. So rather than the psychotherapy being based on this expert insight that’s going to come from the therapist to the client, we need approaches that will put the client in a context and environment where they can get the insight that’s transformative. And the therapists role is really just to allow space for it to happen. We need approaches that are going to consider what mindfulness is supposed to be. Mindfulness is not necessarily just a relaxation technique, it’s actually meant to see the true reality of what it is that you’re experiencing in this moment, as uncomfortable as it can be, when we were able to sit with the reality of things, we can change the way how we feel about them. And sometimes a byproduct of that will be relaxation, sometimes a byproduct of that will be insight. And I wanted to find a way of being able to make it so that people could get this benefit from mindfulness, without needing to go up in a mountain, or in a cave, or very far away. And that it would be something portable. And so that’s why the idea of Four Blinks… the idea that a person, if they can’t go to nature, they can bring the nature to them through watching a picture, video, music that they can bring these good experiences to themselves. I think there’s something transformative in that. And so I’m trying to find out how to not only just talk about anti-racism, but make it that the structure of the session is also something that’s based on empowering an individual who has been oppressed by a social structure. And that involves changing the structure of how the therapy happens in real-time.
Thomas Zimmerman Right. And this reminds me of a conference that we have both been to… want to talk a little bit about one of my experiences at this unnamed conference. While in the hallway, and in the elevator, you know, I heard an EMDR therapist talking about… and again, white male EMDR therapists talking about this particular case, and then I did this, and then I did that, and then the client was this way and then I did. And it seems to me that that a lot of psychotherapy, even in a field, you know, 80 plus percent female, it still suffers from the white male ego footprint. Because I was like, I was shocked because I’m like, this is that’s not my experience. My experience is that in a great EMDR session, I’m going on a journey with someone, and it’s their journey. Do you know what I mean? And I’m not like walking around the internal experience micromanaging… you know what I mean… their journey, it’s just a shocking amount… It’s a shocking amount of ego. And I think what I love about these approaches, and what I love about about the RAP Technique, is that and I think it’s part of correct me if I’m wrong, I think it’s part of what this joy that I’m picking up with you is, and I’ve heard you say it in many different ways. I’m trying to connect you with what’s always been awesome in you.
David Archer Yes, yes.
Thomas Zimmerman Is that the core of modern trauma psychotherapies is not the therapist. It is something that is deep inside us? Right. So if you don’t mind, would you mind describing, not getting into the details, but describing what transformational change looks like, from the perspective of the RAP Technique or from other, you know, other approaches? Because, to be honest, EMDR therapists have a glimpse of that. But I would guess that 90% of therapist have never seen transformational change happen in front of them in a single session?
David Archer Yes. So. So transformational change, I think is something that we all want to see happen for our clients, but we don’t always know how to make it happen. But I think many therapists have actually seen it. But it was hard for them to be able to piece together what it is that took place. I’ll just give an example is that typically, as a therapist what happens is that a client comes in, and then they’re going to ask, they’re going to say they have this problem. And then we’re going to ask some questions of okay, what exactly is going on? What is this? How do you feel… what is… you know, we will ask these questions, and sometimes the client can feel a little bit better. And then after they leave, and then we’ll wonder, wait a second, what just happened? We’re not really sure what happened. And then another client comes in, and a similar thing happens, we ask them questions and then they feel a little bit better or maybe feel a little bit worse. And then we wonder what the heck was going on. But I encountered the problems of when I’d have trauma clients come in, then I’d ask some questions and then they’d feel worse. And so then after I’d have to get my clinical supervision, I’d have to go through my trainings. And I’d say, what is that? Why is this happening? And this led me through getting stuck multiple times, and, and clients being able to say, let’s try this, or maybe we can try something different. It was in community, in community, with my clients and in community with the colleagues that I have, that allowed me to start to think differently about how therapy can be. So instead of the therapist being the one that’s going to ask the questions of, you know, of trying to direct how the healing journey should take place, the therapist then can ask a question of what is the resource that you would like to access, the therapist can give choices for the client in terms of what’s the awesome video you’d like to watch today? You know, what is what’s the awesome music video, what’s the what’s the, the image, you know, and it puts the client who has been deprived of choice because of trauma, because many of our clients have been traumatized without their consent, it puts them in a position where they’re able to make a determination as to what is going to be the thing that helps them to heal. And the beautiful thing about it is that when we are able to provide this disconfirmation, and how the structure of psychotherapy is, when we’re able to provide a disconfirmation in how they remember the thing and instead of them remembering the trauma and feeling stressed about it, they can instead remember the trauma and… puppies, or instead, it’s now joy, or instead it’s now confidence. We are then using what is called memory reconsolidation that we recall what has taken place, we provide a disconfirmation. And then we reencode the way how the memory has been stored. And when we are able to do this in a skillful way and in a structured way, we are able to have transformative change take place where the symptoms don’t come back, the emotions associated with the symptoms do not feel the same way. And the client doesn’t have to be afraid of being able to confront their fears anymore. I think many of our clients are brave to begin with, to be able to say that you’re going to sit with a stranger or relative stranger, and you’re going to share your deepest, most personal fears that itself requires a degree of bravery. So what we are trying to do is we are trying to make it so that with transformative approaches is that the therapist too can also facilitate this bravery by making it so that the client can have more choice over what it is that is taking place, that the client that the client is able to exceed our expectations by tapping into their infinite creativity. And ultimately, what I wanted to say before to what you were saying is that we are able to do justice to the term recovery. When I think of recovery, it is that we are reclaiming aspects of ourself that have been powerful from the beginning. When I see my son, who’s running around and I’m trying to prevent him from trying to chew on electrical cords or trying to jump off of couches, it’s like, when he hit his head, I held him this morning, I tried my best, but he got a good hug. I said this is the reason why gravity works this way and why you can’t be that close to the ledge. But he’s good. He’s all right now. But the thing is that that curiosity, he has… the willingness to want to explore, we’ve always had these things. But when we become traumatized, it limits our idea of what we think is possible. The traumatized client comes with the belief of, I cannot trust people, I am unsafe, I am not good enough. When we use transformative approaches, we clear out that noise, so they can reclaim these positive beliefs that will say, I love myself, I’m a good person, I’m a good son, I’m a good family member, etc, etc. And ultimately, what we want is to make it so we can heal from the society that sets the stage where some people are going to be traumatized in different ways or increases the likelihood that certain people will be traumatized in these ways. And we make it so that the people are able to discern, is this a belief that’s worth keeping? What is the belief that’s more important for me? And that choice, the idea of choice is a key part of being able to bring disconfirmation and overturning information in my sessions.
Thomas Zimmerman Excellent. Okay. What about this concept? So okay, I’m someone who’s processed a fair amount of my trauma. And I have new ways of thinking about myself. But I’m still a person in societies designed to extinguish me. So, I’m asking a rhetorical question to kind of… what’s what’s utility and me doing my own work, when the work really needs to be social. So can you talk a little bit about resilience or a little bit about… why do my own work when I can’t control the levers of power in the cultures that surround me?
David Archer And, okay, there are two points here. One of them is that I think it was Einstein, who said this, but correct me if I’m wrong, Internet, feel free. That’s what the internet is great for, there’s always some comments section. Anyway. If we have a problem at one level of consciousness, sometimes we need to go to a different level of consciousness in order to resolve it. So if we are thinking about, I want to solve this problem in society, but I am powerless to do so. And that’s where we stop, then there’s not much more that can be added to that. I want to speak about something that happened last week, there was a client that we were working on a trauma target. Well, before we worked on the trauma that she wanted to work on, I said, we’re going to use a racial trauma target instead. And so we used an issue that related to the colonization of her homeland. While we were working on it, there was a part of her that was upset because she said, “Well, I don’t want to get rid of my rage, because what they did to me was, was not just…” and we had to have a little discussion about that, is that I told her that “I’m definitely an anti-racist. And I definitely agree that the anger that you have is justified. But when it is rage in this form, it seems as if it’s directed towards yourself that we need to make it so that we process this negative belief that’s associated with the colonization that says, I’m not good enough. And when we are able to heal from these negative beliefs that are there, we are more we are put into a better situation where we can heal not from this wounded position or from a place of deficit, but from a place of integrity.” So then, after she was able to install a belief that said that she is one with her ancestors… If we are going to do activism, and the negative belief is I’m not good enough, there’s a chance, increased chance of burnout because you’re reinforcing this negative belief, increased chance of ineffectiveness of the method and the intervention. If we are going to do activism and the basis of it as I am one with my ancestors, there’s a higher chance that you are connecting to something that’s greater to yourself, you’re also thinking of community, and there’s a different type of fuel rather than burning your own candle. You’re also like moving with the momentum of something that’s, that’s intangible and spiritual as well. And so when we are able to install positive beliefs that are accessing something that’s very different from where we’re at. When we are processing trauma targets that are very different from just the standard things that a therapist is going to ask, the client gets answers that exceed our expectations. I’ll say it in another way. I had a client who is Lebanese, and they’re very fearful of bombs being dropped on their family, even though they’re over in Canada. And I could have, as a therapist, given some explanations of their cognitive distortions, or tried to say, well, now this is how things are gonna go, I could have given all of these explanations. Instead, what we used was Resource Integration, which is a technique that is in the Rhythm and Processing Strategies. So we had an unsolvable problem, there was almost nothing that I could say to her about the fear that she has of her family being in danger. But when we use the resources, she was able to connect to something that’s much, much deeper than my knowledge, it connected to an ancestral, or a cultural memory. So she was able to connect to an image of her playing cards, lit and the environment is lit by candlelight. And even though at that time, during the Civil War, there were bombs that were dropping, she was still able, in a way of resistance, of still being able to say, “I’m still going to be a child, I’m still going to be around other people, I’m still going to love myself, even if there are bombs dropping around me.” So that feeling that she got was able to reduce the stress that she had in that moment, more than anything that I could say more than even anything that she could say, because not only is it that a picture’s worth 1000 words, maybe a video is worth a million words, but connecting to your cultural memory, to something that has protected you in the past before, to something that’s not even in English, that’s maybe in her Arabic in her mother tongue. I think that that’s worth, I don’t know, 10 trillion words, there’s not even a way of being able to justify it. But let’s just say that that was able to solve an unsolvable problem. So this is what I do with my clients on a regular basis. So when I am helping them to heal and recover from gendered violence, I’m not giving them the instruction, that you’re going to become an advocate for other people who are going through these difficulties. But compassion just seems to be the gift that keeps on giving. When we’re able to help a person to heal from their suffering, there’s a different set of assumptions that they’re going to operate with. And many times because they believe that they’ve been able to heal through that disconfirmation, they become better suited to help other people to have other disconfirmations as well.
Thomas Zimmerman Excellent. So where we put our own feet matters, healing can help with that. I’m having recently reread Anti-Racist Psychotherapy. I’d like to talk about where a lot of non anti-racist therapists may put their feet in it is this kind of and you talk about it a lot in the book. But I’d invite you to communicate pretty clearly what someone who has been oppressed by cultures might feel in a therapy office with someone with privilege, who does the kind of almost omniscient… meaning… “I don’t see race,” they almost like try to deal for the problem by disappearing the idea that I have feet too, and those feet are placed somewhere, right? It’s almost it’s an almost a kind of omniscient claim, right? That I’m above all of this. And and I think that’s probably… almost certainly something that most I mean, most therapist especially therapist with privilege, whether they feel like they have privilege or not, it’s the it’s the default way of operating and traditional psychotherapy allows it.
David Archer Well that’s what it’s going to say is that it’s default in that traditional psychotherapy encourages it. Let’s say it in this way. For some reason the person who says that “I don’t see race,” they never say “I don’t see gender.” They don’t, even though both of these are socially-constructed. And so it’s interesting that race is supposed to be invisible. And but the same people that are that have these conservative perspectives will definitely tell you… I’m not going to get into the the challenges in the social implications of Bud Light commercials, but I’m not, I’m not gonna get into why people get upset over ridiculous things. Let me say it in this way, is, when we talk about privilege, we’re talking about a therapist who has privilege, we just need to be specific about what privilege is. Privilege is the absence of mindfulness. Privilege is I don’t need to think about certain types of things. For example, as a male, there are times where, if I’m gonna go… I’m a father now, and I’m really busy with stuff… I’m just going to use this example, if I’m going to go to the nightclub or whatever, okay, I’m super cool. I don’t need to go with my friends, I can just go by myself if I want to. But for some women, they need to make sure that where their friends are, who has their phone number and all that, depending on the context, of course, okay. The privilege is that I don’t need to think about this. Let me use another example. If we’re talking about a person who’s rich, I can spend as much money as I want, I don’t really need to care about paying the bills, the person who’s in poverty, they need to be mindful of every coin that they’re using every penny that they’re spending, etc, etc. So, privilege, as I’ve understood it is really that you don’t need to think… you don’t need to actually be… and sometimes being a therapist puts us in a privileged position as well. But instead of us not thinking it’s that we can dissociate ourselves, we can separate ourselves from reality, or from the present moment, when the person is saying, “I don’t see color,” they’re really trying to separate themselves from the experience that they’re in. Because if they were to see color, it might be a little bit painful to recognize that their color has been used to harm other people. And they’ve been able to benefit in different types of ways. You’re bringing me to the concept of the Binary Complex Trauma Cycle, which I’ll explain as shortly as I can, is that on one side you will see there’s this thing that’s called White supremacy/insecurity. I call it that because the White supremacists are never very secure in themselves. And I think we should maybe even move away from saying it’s White supremacy, because the mass shooters that do these things usually have an experience that doesn’t show that they feel good about themselves ever. These terrorists that do these things, they’re never really in the best psychological space. For this idea of White insecurity, the way how it maintains itself is by a concept that’s called Soul Murder. So intense violence is directed towards another through emotional, sexual violence, etc. And that violence is projected into the Black body. That’s what leads to the concept of Black suffering. This is when the Black person internalized the idea that they are lazy, despite the fact that our ancestors were worked to death, that the Black male is hyper-sexualized, despite the fact that White and slavers sexually violated multiple young girls, etc. But we don’t talk about the sexual part of slavery, because it’s too inconvenient. It adds race and gender and we don’t see, we don’t see race, and we kind of see gender. So it gets a little complicated. What happens though, is what feeds into the idea of Black suffering is the fact that Whiteness dissociates itself from any responsibility. So we will have these slave movies that need to come out all the time to reinforce the idea of Black inferiority, and the, and the fact that Whiteness is not guilty of it, that it to some degree, we’re always focusing on the pain of Black people. So there’s pain without an oppressor. So of course, people will be colorblind, and they won’t see racism as an actual issue. But this feeds into this dissociation that takes place. So the cycle is that Blackness is associated with suffering. And Whiteness maintains itself by dissociating from anything that even resembles suffering or injustice, that the the negative traits of Whiteness are always projected into something other than itself, leading to this void that exists within Whiteness. So we spoke about it as a default. But I do think that it’s encouraged in our society to make it that White people do not necessarily think about Whiteness. Otherwise, we might turn around and think, hold on a second as a White person. Am I really enjoying all of the benefits of the American dream? Is Whiteness really a thing? Or is it really something that’s been given to me to make it so that I protect the upper class of people that are really benefiting and keeping many of us in poverty? These are the ideas that, of course, MLK was talking about, Fred Hampton was talking about as well, Fred Hampton with the Rainbow Coalition of bringing together White people, because again, just knowing that while we are using these terms of White and Black, these are just metaphors. But if we are able to understand that there’s a common oppressor, that is causing the racism, the sexism, the poverty that’s crushing many Americans doesn’t matter what color you are, then we will we’ll realize that we all outnumber the racists, we will do away with the idea of thinking that it is just located and just the person based on their phenotype. And we will understand that Whiteness is something that is meant to crush and harm people, but use White people as a shield to protect that. So I think that the people who are colorblind, who don’t see race, I think, you know, I understand, I understand their pain and their suffering, but I invite them to practice a bit more mindfulness.
Thomas Zimmerman And as someone who’s tried, you know, attended, you know, assorted diversity seminars, someone who has, I mean, clearly privilege, I can walk into any bank, around here, walk into any bank, and walk out of it. And nobody’s going to know that I walked in five minutes later, there’s an enormous amount of privilege and trying, trying to explore that privilege is complicated for those of us who are doing it. And I know, EMDRIA is all about it, you know, EMDRIA is trying to, the last trainer day was all about anti-racism, diversity. And it was great, but there was also a lot of people in the room who didn’t know, I think how to feel, I think it was, you know, I think a lot of people, a lot of people who identify as White try to do this work… and they don’t know how to do it. Right. And, of course, the, you know, ultimately, a lot of this and I’ve heard you say elsewhere that, you know, part of what being about it is is actually using your privilege in the in the in the concrete service, meaning giving up some of it almost in the concrete service of those that don’t have it. It’s that’s really making it actionable. But it is… I also think it’s deeply unfair, right, on its surface, for a White person to ask an anti-racist trainer. How do I do this? How do you comfort me from the distress that I’m feeling? Because I think, you know, kind of attuning, you know, a little bit to, what my own experiences were… I had multiple, multiple voices? You know, and I guess the voice I’ve been trying to listen to is first just listen. First, just just be present and listen to what’s being communicated. You don’t have to figure out exactly what right now to do. But I think there is a little bit of uncertainty about what to do and how to feel.
David Archer It makes sense…. let me add this is that it’s very much like the dissociative client, the dissociative client also feels confused about their symptoms, because they’re getting time distortion, they’re getting amnesic barriers, they’re getting somatic feelings that are hard to understand. And these things might be very similar to those attendees that you’re talking about. It’s just they couldn’t put a finger on it. And oftentimes, they will judge that because they feel bad, the speaker is bad, right? Because I’m feeling this thing. It’s him, you know, and that’s what I’m explaining is that Whiteness needs to dissociate from itself, it needs to make it that we are not in touch with these feelings or not being really close to them. The good news is that this is not an unsolvable problem. Again, some of many of my consultees that are White therapists, clinicians, these are people who own practices, they call upon me to help them to be able to process these things. These are things that are not stored at the level of our just our cognitions. But it’s in our nervous system. So anti-racist psychotherapy is not just designed to help to heal the wounds of racial trauma, but it’s also designed to help to heal the racial trauma that White people have inherited from the system as well.
Thomas Zimmerman Right. And that’s something that… I’ve heard you talk about it. I’ve heard Resmaa Menakem talk about it… White people aren’t okay. They, which I think is a generous perspective.
David Archer Yes, exactly. But again, I think that when we think about how, and I write about this as well… when we think about a yoga instructor, despite the fact where we believe yoga comes from… the people who are yoga instructors don’t always look that way. It’s usually a white woman who eats kale that we’re gonna think of as a yoga instructor. But what’s very interesting about that, too, is that we also disregard the influence of Kemetic yoga of knowing that the Dravidic Indians who went to India, they came from somewhere. And they brought that knowledge from somewhere in very convenient ways, Africa is usually erased from our history. Even the idea… the reason why Portugal was trying to… like when we’re talking about Christopher Columbus in that time in that era, they don’t talk about the importance that Portugal had of going to Mali to reach the richest man who ever existed, Mansa Musa. So we try to erase any reference to Africa in our society. And we try to just make it so that Black people are only associated with one thing. But what I wanted to say is that with White people, the reason why I think yoga is important for a lot of them is to connect with their bodies. Even though they’ve erased the cultural implications of it. The reason why mindfulness now is becoming or has become more interesting in psychotherapy is because White people need to connect to their mind as well. I’m hoping that when we are able to use Four Blinks, when we are able to use the RAP Technique, that we are able to heal all people from the suffering that the society has caused, so that they can feel fully integrated, and not just their body, not just their mind, but all parts of the self.
Thomas Zimmerman So racism is partially a somatic dissociation?
David Archer It is largely that, it is largely that… except it’s at the societal level, and that there’s a system and that everyone is in on it, but you’re not allowed to talk about it, because it’s too painful. And you got to blame someone else for it. It’s like as if there’s a problem that we only see the victim for. And we don’t see the oppressor for it. Because you know, don’t see race, don’t worry, it’s easier this way. But it is solvable, we are able to reduce these, these experiences, because it’s survival based responses for racism, it’s White people feeling like they’ll be replaced. And that’s, that’s what Resmaa Menakem was talking about with White body supremacy… is talking about how White people came to the country out of fear came to the country out of wanting to save themselves, lived in the environment, through genocide, through stealing people, through attacking people and all these things. So a lot of the violence, all of that stuff that can’t be said is what those White trainers were feeling in that conference that you’re talking about.
Thomas Zimmerman Thank you, and to I, again, I want to get back to the RAP Technique, because this is this is a lot of what I want to I want to highlight… and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you may be the first therapist to make a psychotherapy, largely built around Flash, right? So it’s been this kind of, you know, this little wand you can get out, but your approach, you know, and again, you know, I’m not asking you to go into it in detail, but can you take a overview of how…
David Archer It’s impossible, Tom, it’s impossible, all of my answers are going to be 25 minutes long…
Thomas Zimmerman But I’m going to encourage you to sit with the difficulty of condensing it, because there’s there’s elegance there really is there really is beauty and elegance, in what you know, in what you’re doing. So, but there’s, there’s a, there’s a part of it. And let me back up a tiny bit. So I think the way we typically think of Flash is to think of it as this almost thing we rummage around in a drawer and get when we need. Does that make sense? And even Four Blinks, which I think can be an approach to psychotherapy, I haven’t developed it into an approach of psychotherapy, but your your RAP conceptualization is a whole package. Does it make sense? It is conceptualized before intake? Do you know what I mean? It’s like, there’s got intake components, there’s assessment components, you know, all the way all the way through to, you know, target selection. And so, anyway, do you mind giving us an overview of RAP as an approach to psychotherapy?
David Archer Sure. So the RAP Technique is part of the RAP Strategies, Rhythm and Processing strategies. The goal is to eliminate the mental health consequences of racial trauma. That’s why I developed it. And I noticed that, again, the structure of how we look at sessions needed to be based on disconfirmation. It needed to be based on the ability for the client to be able to change radically how they look at things, and to be able to have choices in the way how they make decisions, which is very different from the way how trauma is installed in the first place. So while there are times that I would use mindfulness techniques to teach the client to use the body to calm the mind and use the mind to calm the body, we also use mindfulness as a way of assessment of being able to check to see is the client within their window of tolerance, is the client able to follow these types of instructions, etc. So it gets a little, it gets a little specific. But just to say that that’s a portion, it’s like using the techniques for a different reason, by being able to teach the RAP Technique by being able to teach the client that they could bring in things that are culturally significant to them. And they can radically change how the next few days will go. Or even radically change how they remember events from the past few years, we are instilling the idea of disconfirmation, by being able to have a genogram, that’s going to say… this is what your family looked like. This is what you might have inherited in terms of legacies that are positive and negative… of looking at it always from a place of balance. This changes the way how they’re looking at their experience in their families. And by making the racial trauma target history selection… of asking questions that are based on what they experienced in their life. This also creates a limited amount of targets that we’re going to process. And by dealing with each of those targets, one by one, we’re able to let the client know that there is no such thing as a broken person, to let the client know that these are things that happen to you. But these are not things that define your full existence. And each time that the client is able to practice being able to feel awesome for no reason. They’re changing the narrative based on the past based on the present, and also based on the future. The RAP Technique is meant to make it so that we train clients to be the best therapist they can be. The RAP Technique is designed to make it so that the client knows that the healing comes from them. And ultimately, and I know that this is something that you would also encourage and endorses that we need to understand, because I’ve heard you say this, we need to understand why it is that we’ve outsourced therapists outside of the community… of making it that the therapy is something outside of who we are. And we want to integrate all aspects of the self, make it so all aspects of the self can get the resources they need, so that they can make changes that exceed their expectations, and their therapists expectations. And one day even to change if not the whole world, at least their internal world.
Thomas Zimmerman Excellent, good. Is there anything that anything else you’d like to talk about before I let people know where they can join a group and when we will be, you know, demonstrating aspects of the RAP Technique.
David Archer The one thing I want to say is to anyone who’s listening to this regardless of your race, regardless of your your gender, your identity, nationality, you are a person of value, you are a person of worth, you’re beautiful because you’re Black, you’re Black because you’re a beautiful, regardless of where you come from. Even if you haven’t found your purpose yet, I hope that you find it so that you can also in your own revolutionary way, find ways of being able to find this compassion, make it the gift that keeps on giving, and make the changes that need to happen in therapy outside of therapy, and throughout the world.
Thomas Zimmerman Excellent, good. So we’ll have a group, it’s scheduled for February 26. In the show notes as this is distributed details can be details can be of it made available about that. So David, thank you. Another wonderful interaction that ends with that ends with that beauty that what is amazing about this work is also what has always been amazing about you and inside you. So there’s that there’s that real therapy process grounded hope. But I’ve heard you some said elsewhere, you also didn’t come to comfort. You know what I mean? You there’s this…
David Archer All of our emotions are beautiful, right? Every single one of our emotions has a function. And when we’re able to see them without judgment, we are able to understand that they’re all moving us towards healing and recovery.
Thomas Zimmerman Right. Excellent. Beautiful. Thank you so much. I hope to have more conversations with you going forward. And, David, where can people get more information about you or do you have a website?
David Archer Yes, so you can find more information about me at ArcherTherapy.com. If you’d like to purchase some of my books, then you can go to Amazon.com and you can find Anti-Racist Psychotherapy, Black Meditation, Racial Trauma Recovery, Black Mountain, and Transforming Complex Trauma. If you don’t want to support billionaires who fly rocket ships around the world, you can also go to your local bookstore or library and you can request these books. The reason why I say that is because this revolution happens through collective. And so if you’re able to request that book, other people will be aware of it. So I would like to just thank you again, Tom, for the work that you’re doing and changing the world. And I see your dedication, and I see your… I see you’re a person who actually is a therapist who’s coming from the heart and for what you are sharing in the world. We need more Tom Zimmerman’s to be to be on this planet.
Thomas Zimmerman Well, thank you. Thank you. And again, I appreciate every good thing you’re doing in the world as well. Let’s talk soon. And thanks everyone for joining. And, stay in touch.
In foundational EMDR Therapy training, we instruct you to just let things go where they go. For relatively healthy people (the people we initially trained you to work with), this is the best and most effective way to work. A large part of what healing is for people with a fair amount of adaptive information is seeing the connection between the various categories of wounding that they have experienced. Encouraging things to go where they may need to go can create the possibility of insight during healing for your healthier clients. It can perhaps promote broader generalization.
The problems can come when we leave the training and try to implement the “let things go where they go” in clinical settings with clients with very little adaptive information and a very small window of tolerance. Things tend to want to go straight off a cliff. Then, EMDR Therapy doesn’t seem like it’s a magic wand that simply dissolves whatever memory we point it at. It may seem like a match that sets the papers on the desk on fire, then the curtains, then room, then the house, then the neighborhood, and then half of Chicago like in the 1870s. It’s easy for you—the therapist—to trace the origin of this burned-out catastrophe back to the match that started in your own hand. Clients having retaumatizing experiences inside EMDR Therapy is the main reason why therapists and clients disengage from using it.
So, if EMDR Therapy isn’t a magic wand with clients with severe and complex trauma, what is it? Where is its magic? The core of the AIP model is that we can connect old stuck information into right-now existing adaptive information, assuming we have enough of it in the areas where it is needed. I use the boat and fish metaphor throughout the EMDR Podcast to describe how the memory content needs to connect to the existing adaptive information. Metaphorically, you cannot land a whale of a memory into adaptive information the size of a canoe. If that’s the magic—connecting stuck information to positive information—that’s also where its limit is found.
If the pathway of healing in EMDR Therapy is that maladaptive stuff has to connect to existing adaptive stuff, here are some questions to ponder. When would your client with complex trauma have had the opportunity to develop this adaptive information? I realize that in Phase One, we are focused on assessing the client’s wounding. Can you see why attempting to assess the client’s fund of adaptive information is also an essential Phase One task? How can you know for sure how much adaptive information a client with complex trauma has? You can’t. But, what can you know, in general about your most pervasively traumatized clients? People with complex trauma have been stuck in survival processes that may have kept them from developing much of the needed adaptive information. We can also know that their wounding is complex, typically spans many developmental eras, and contains many of the worst things that can happen to a human on this planet. In short, assume a small boat when it is clear that their oceans are filled with monsters. There is typically an inverse relationship between the two. I’m just going to suggest that you already knew this. Even before your EMDR Therapy training. It’s easy to misunderstand the kind of magic that EMDR Therapy is.
The healthiest clients we will see were resourced well by life—hundreds of thousands of positive experiences helped them develop much of the needed adaptive information to do EMDR Therapy well. Being born to people who knew how to love right and consistently and having the experiences over and over of nurture, agency, visibility, protection, importance, and guidance literally installs adaptive information into your human nervous system. It’s easy to believe the lessons in the nostalgia of your earliest experiences. And it’s easy to believe the lies. For well-resourced clients, EMDR Therapy is like a magic wand. For everyone else, it is not. The Adaptive Information Processing Model explains clearly why this is the case.
So, if we are in the position of having to connect large chunks of difficult information into small amounts of adaptive information, then we need to develop skills and strategies to do that more effectively. You make adjustments and accommodations already for your severely traumatized clients in what you already do with them. If there is hesitancy to make reasonable adjustments in EMDR Therapy, then you may be operating from the assumption that EMDR Therapy is a magic wand for all clients, thus it should be conducted exactly the same way for every client on your caseload as though it is some type of spell or incantation. We have already muddied these waters. Also, you don’t employ this type of rigidity in any other approach to therapy that you do… why do you do this in this approach? Probably because that is how you were trained. Rigid adherence to any protocol that is blind to the actual human nervous system in front of you isn’t trauma-informed practice, it’s trying to push your diversely shaped clients through some type of machine. As I’ve argued elsewhere, we need our interventions to match the shape of the client’s nervous system. The need to make modifications based on sound clinical judgment is written into EMDRIA’s definition of EMDR Therapy. Remarkably little of what I’m saying here is controversial. Here are some places I would suggest reasonable adjustments to standard protocol when working with clients with severely complex trauma. In each of these, I’m going to explain why Dr. Shapiro wanted us to do things in a certain way and why (based on the AIP model), it makes clinical sense to at least consider making some adjustments based on the nervous system of the client you are working with.
The Problem with Too Much Memory Content
We need memory content to come, but we need it to come at a digestible and tolerable rate. If it doesn’t, the client may flood their basement and we may spend the rest of the session dealing with the mess of that initial big wave of distress that may or may not include a shut-down response. The distress that comes and that we are encouraging the client to notice needs to come inside the client’s window of tolerance. All of the noticing that is productive in EMDR Therapy happens in the present. The ability to be and remain present requires a tolerable range of distress. If the client spends the whole session reexperiencing the trauma as it happened (rather than its resonance in the present), that is typically a retraumatizing and confirming experience. Healing happens when we have experiences different from the expectation in the bad memory, not when they are identical to them. Distress coming in small enough pieces that allow us to stay present with our current experience may be disconfirming enough for this memory reconsolidation work to occur. In short, clients have to experience the memory differently than the experience of a flashback. We need to help clients activate, but not over-activate. We need to also appreciate that complex trauma, when activated, doesn’t want to come out in easily digestible pieces. We may need to help clients activate, but not over-activate. Here are just a few strategies to help clients do that.
Strategies Related to Memory Selection
One of the most sensible ways to help clients manage distress, particularly in the first few targets we work on, is to start with smaller targets that do not connect to a lot of adjacent content. Dr. Shapiro is right that if we start with Mt. Everest, everything after that will feel like a small hill. However, my clients are not Olympians. From that AIP lens, you cannot connect Mt. Everest to adaptive information the size of a walnut. We need to appreciate that there are 200 dead bodies on Mt. Everest right now. If we need to tackle Mt. Everest (and we do), we better start with some smaller hills first. This guidance is not controversial when working with complex trauma. It’s guidance that Dr. Shapiro makes about half a dozen times in her core text when working with clients with complex trauma.
Working with memories that may be more recent, less connected to the whales of attachment wounding and other identify-impacting themes, is a great place to start. With really complex clients, we may start with the person who pulled out in traffic in front of them two weeks ago, an ex-partner a few partners ago, or a car accident in which no one was seriously hurt. This can allow the client to test the fishing gear. Helpful information about the client’s nervous system, including clues about the client’s ability to tolerate larger amounts of distress in future targets are often revealed. If difficulties emerge, even with small targets, that is not failure. It is information. That information is essential to the client’s recovery.
Even if we start with a smaller memory, is it possible that other memories may want to connect? Yes. And with reasonably healthy people, we want to let them come assuming there is time and enough window of tolerance. But, just because memories want to come, that doesn’t mean that it’s always a good idea to let them. Remember that many, many, memories may be stored in individual memory networks of people with complex trauma. The body gets activated and lots of memories may want to come, almost like being drawn by the magnet of the body activation. Some memories will want to come because they have the same body feel. Again, we need memory content to come, but we need it to come at a digestible rate. If you are already hooked to a 700lb tuna and you are in a 10-foot canoe, does it make sense to then hook onto two whales and five sharks? In the AIP lens, we can only land a fish that our boat can support.
Helping clients decide what memories to let in is an important exercise in client agency. My metaphor for this a barbeque grill in the backyard. The grill may spread smells all through the neighborhood and lots of neighbors may want to come, but it’s your house and your grill. They don’t get to simply burst in your door, walk across your living room, open the sliding door to your yard, and open your grill and eat your food. It’s your door. You get to decide who comes to this party. With clients with complex trauma, I am helping them contain the memories that want to come when they are already struggling with the fish they are hooked onto. Again, we need distress to come, but it needs to come at a digestible rate and intensity.
To complicate matters, transformational trauma therapies often work best when we are working with an individual representative memory. But with clients with complex trauma, there is a strong tendency to pivot to the theme. For instance, a memory that involves cognitions about lovability can quickly pivot to the client trying to figure out if they are lovable. It’s easy for clients to pivot from an individual memory to something existential. Here is an example: Think about the last time you had heartache at the end of a relationship that may have ended in a way you didn’t anticipate or want. At the peak of that heartache, you were probably thinking of other instances of heartache. They may have very similar body feels. Imagine how easy it is to pivot from an individual memory of heartache to the existential questions: Why does everyone I’ve ever loved hurt me? Am I ever going to find love? It is completely understandable that the nervous system would go there. But, can you appreciate that EMDR Therapy isn’t a Magic 8-Ball. It’s not good at resolving most themes as a whole and it rarely resolves existential questions. Healing can help the existential questions lose a lot of their urgency, but it’s easy to start with an individual memory and wind up in a goose chase of trying to figure big things out. With clients with complex trauma, I often send them back to target when we bump against the broader theme or the existential edges of human experience.
How your clients with complex trauma interact with the memory matters. Again, we need memory content to come, but we need it to come in digestible rates and intensities that match the right-now window of tolerance. First, I don’t want the client to be in the memory. I want the client to be in the present glancing occasionally at that memory. One of the most common forms of dissociation I observe with my clients is that clients are simply too much into the memory and not present enough in this moment to notice deeply. All of the noticing that is productive happens in the present. All healing happens in the present. If the client is mostly processing and narrating on the memory channel with no attention to what they are noticing right-here right-now, I will redirect them to the present. If the client isn’t having a different experience with the memory in EMDR Therapy than what typically occurs in a flashback, I can almost guarantee you that their EMDR experience will be retraumatizing.
Relatedly, I do not want the client to stay focused on the memory the whole time. Clients believe, incorrectly, that they have to constantly push into the distress of the memory. This is a recipe for overactivation for many clients. Again, we want memory content to come, but it needs to come at a digestible rate and intensity. A better metaphor is to take a bite of the memory and notice that bite until it is digested. Then take the next bite. Digest that bite, then take the next. There are strategies for doing this well. These strategies can help promote the distress coming in ways that ripple inside the window of tolerance, rather than saturate and overtop it.
When clients struggle taking digestible bites of the memory, I may use a bean bag in session and invite the client to toss it into the air. I ask the client to think about the memory only when the bean bag is in the air. This serves as a kind of timer to help limit the amount of content and distress that comes into awareness at once. It may take multiple rounds of noticing with bilateral for the distress to dissipate before I encourage the client to toss the bean bag again and get the next piece of content from the memory to notice. Often clients can put the bean bag down and simply think about the memory once the initial big waves of distress are digested and the client struggles to find distress when the bean bag is in the air.
The most common way that I work with clients with complex trauma is using the videotape approach mentioned by Dr. Shapiro in her main text in the section on Complex PTSD. The videotape approach involves some modifications to standard protocol in Phases Three and Four. There are many ways to do it, but the link to my script is in the notes section to this podcast. Essentially, we make the memory a piece of video and walk through each frame of it chronologically, pausing and digesting each piece of distress with rounds of bilateral noticing, and not allowing the video to play forward until the prior distress is largely metabolized. We do this in Phase Four, until the client can play the memory and there is no distress on any channel, then we go to Phase Five and continue with standard protocol.
It may seem that strategies to microactivate the memory will take longer. That’s simply not true with clients with complex trauma. What dramatically slows reprocessing is dealing with overactivation and the problematic parts interactions that come in response to that overactivation. Many clients will struggle with reprocessing because of the volume or intensity of the memory content coming into working memory in a short time period. In review, these are just some of your options if you notice clients struggling:
Pick a memory that is more tolerable (especially when the reprocessing phases with new clients with complex trauma)
Discourage other adjacent memories from coming (especially when the client is right-now struggling to digest the distress they are currently noticing)
Identify when the client has pivoted from an individual memory to a theme (or an existential rumination) and direct them back to target
Help clients stay grounded in the present (not dissociated into the memory)
Encourage the client to interact with the memory a little bit at a time (rather than staying focused on it) by glancing at the memory, using a bean bag as a timer, or using the videotape approach.
When clients struggle working with memory content effectively, there are many, many, strategies that may be helpful. When clients struggle, it is not failure. It is information. Use the information to help identify why they are struggling and modify your interventions to match the information that you now have about your client’s nervous system. Many consultants can help you with this. Almost everything on the EMDR Podcast is about this.
Many newly-trained therapists think that if they do not do EMDR Therapy exactly as they are trained, client harm is likely to occur. We train you rigidly because we want you to understand what you are modifying from… so that you don’t make your own Frankenstein therapy before you even understand what EMDR Therapy is. Now that you understand how to work with a relatively healthy person—which is how we trained you—learn some sensible modifications so that your interventions can match the nervous systems you are working with. Otherwise, you may be cramming your clients with severe trauma into a machine that poorly fits them. And that is not trauma-focused care. And, EMDR never was a machine. You can make sensible modifications and still be doing EMDR Therapy. Often, that’s what doing EMDR Therapy well with clients with complex trauma will require.
The EMDR Podcast 